


Half-Sense

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Child Death, Fairy Tales, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 02:00:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17572163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "this might be a bit complicated.The first story I every read as a child about Jack Frost was in a book called ‘Old Peter’s Russian Tales’ by Arthur Ransome. It is a bit like Cinderella, evil step-mother and spoilt step-sisters, but the Prince is Jack Frost, or Old Man Winter. This is a version of it on wikipedia.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Frost_(fairy_tale)So please? Rewrite a fairy tale with Tooth as the good girl, and RotG’s Jack?"AU in which Jack is much older than Tooth. Jack is chosen as a Guardian and Tooth remembers how she met him, and why that makes her uneasy about his being chosen. His idea of a playful trick is…well…not good for ordinary people.





	Half-Sense

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr 8/16/2013.

Jack Frost? A Guardian? It only made half-sense to Tooth. After all, he was so very, very old despite looking so young, and her memories of her first meeting with him made her wary. All of the Guardians relied on the logic of stories in their lives, but Jack Frost was more entwined with the cruel balancing justice employed by old fairy tales than most. Even North, with his naughty and nice lists, did not think the way Jack Frost thought.  
  
***  
  
Centuries ago, before Tooth was a Guardian, when she was just a little girl, she had lived in a small house with her father, her stepmother, and her stepsister. They had been poor, and in a fairy-tale way that perhaps should have alerted Tooth (though she was not called that then) to the fact that her life would never be quite ordinary, her stepmother hated her, and her father never stood up for her.  
  
She couldn’t see any rhyme or reason behind her stepmother’s hate, especially since she tried her best to be good, assuming that if she became rude and disobedient things would get even worse. Her stepsister, not as bright as Tooth, also could not understand what made Tooth so different from her, that she would deserve such harsh treatment. Often, her stepsister joined in her stepmother’s cruelty to Tooth, her manner nervous, as if she was unsure, yet hopeful, that this show of solidarity would enable her to keep her mother’s seemingly capriciously bestowed love.  
  
In true fairy-tale fashion, one winter, when food was scarce, her stepmother told her father to take her into the snowy fields to die. He obeyed, and in non-fairy-tale fashion, Tooth knew she would never forgive him. She did not try to follow him when he left her.   
  
So young then, she did not really believe she would die, and she realized she had been close to death when Jack Frost arrived only much later. That winter she had merely been surprised when he appeared.   
  
“Why, you are not like me,” he said. “What are you doing out in the cold?”  
  
“If you please, sir,” she said, for with the ice and snow swirling around him creating temporary cloaks and crowns, he was the grandest person she had ever seen, “my father left me here at my stepmother’s command. I am to die, leaving more food for them and my stepsister.”  
  
His eyes flashed. “They are not doing this because you are a particularly cruel, wicked little girl?”  
  
She cast her eyes down, “I do not think so. I always try my best to be good.”  
  
“And so you are,” said Jack Frost. “We will play a trick on them. When they come to bury you, you will still be alive, and better than all of them in a way they understand.” And in moments he had made her a snug snow hut to keep out the wind and she found herself piled with fine warm clothing, and sitting on a chest which, when she opened it, was filled to the brim with diamonds and pearls.  
  
The next day her father returned for her body and was overjoyed to see her alive. (She did not return his embrace.)  
  
The day after that, her stepmother ordered her father to send her stepsister into the fields, with Tooth’s same story a lie on her lips. Surely, her stepmother thought, they could get twice as many jewels this way and leave this cold land for somewhere warm and bounteous, where they could live like kings.  
  
Tooth didn’t know what her poor slow stepsister had said, but her father had returned with her body the next day. Jack had not been done with his trick on her father and stepmother, it seemed.  
  
Her stepmother had not been very cruel to her after that, but then again she had not been much of anything after her daughter died. The small house became silent, and her chest of diamonds and pearls had been the only thing that supported the three of them, and later supported her father and stepmother when Tooth left one summer as soon as she was old enough.  
  
She had left in the summer because she had not wanted to risk the aid of Winter again.  
  
***  
  
“As long as he protects the children, right?” she says to the other Guardians, wondering if her uncertainty is as visible on her face as it feels.


End file.
